As you build integrations natively, you’ll likely run into roadblocks. And even once your integrations are built, you'll eventually need help with resolving specific issues.

To help you navigate any issues or opportunities, 3rd-party API providers offer a variety of ways to support your team. We’ll cover their approaches, the shortcomings of each, and an option to help you avoid relying on API providers' support altogether. 

But first, let’s break down what API integration support means.

What is API integration support?

It’s all the ways a 3rd-party API provider helps your team when it comes to building to their endpoints and maintaining those connections.

Related: What is third-party API integration

API integration support channels

Here’s what you can expect from an API provider.

Documentation 

API providers normally offer readily-available information that covers a wide range of information about their API. Here’s just some of what you’ll be able to find through their documentation:

• The endpoints you can build to 
• The required and optional parameters you’d use for making requests to a given endpoint
• The HTTP methods available for each endpoint 
• Details on the authentication method(s) they use and how you can authenticate with the API
• All the potential error codes and messages you might see, along with tips for addressing each issue
• Dynamic examples of API requests and responses across coding languages
• Details on rate limits, which can include how they’re enforced and what happens if and when you exceed the limit

In some cases, you can even find the history of all the changes an API provider has made and the changes they plan to make. This can make the process of diagnosing and troubleshooting issues easier. It can also empower your team to develop a more future-proof integration roadmap. 

Related: A guide reading API documentation

Communities and forums

API documentation can be difficult to sift through, and it might not have all the answers your team needs over time. 

To help you overcome these issues, you can turn to specific communities and forums hosted by the API provider, where you can ask specific questions to other consumers of that API. These individuals may have run into a similar problem themselves, and assuming they were able to overcome it, they can provide the guidance you need to address the issue yourself.

You might even be able to see if someone has already asked the question to the forum or community and what the answers were—allowing you to avoid asking the question altogether.

You can also follow API-related topics in a community to stay abreast of any changes to the API, identify opportunities to build more impactful integrations, and more.

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Customer support 

In the event that you can’t get your questions answered in an API provider’s docs and their community or forum doesn’t prove helpful, you might be able to contact the provider’s support team.

You might experience a long response time, but you’ll likely receive the answer you need to overcome the issue. Moreover, the API provider will (or at least should) address your situation in their documentation afterwards, allowing other consumers of their API to troubleshoot that same issue more easily in the future.

Related: A guide to using API sandboxes

The drawbacks of API integration support

Unfortunately, API providers often fail to make each of the support channels above useful and readily available to consumers.

Let’s take a closer look at the issues that come with each support channel.

API documentation can be inaccurate and difficult to use

API providers often don’t update their documentation, as the engineers tasked with overseeing it are likely consumed with other critical work; alternatively, these engineers might simply forget to update the documentation or make doing so a priority.

Regardless of the reason, you’ll end up with documentation that leaves out critical details that can help your team troubleshoot existing issues or avoid any down the line. In addition, the documentation can fail to help your team take advantage of additional features and capabilities that get released, such as new endpoints becoming available.

And even when the documentation is consistently updated and accurate, it can prove extremely difficult to use. 

Information can be presented in ambiguous and confusing ways; pages with key information can be difficult to find; examples of requests and responses can be scarce, and so on.  

Related: The drawbacks of point to point integration

Communities and forums are often inactive—assuming they even exist

As you ask questions in a given API provider’s forum or community, you’ll likely have a hard time getting a response, or at least one that’s helpful. Moreover, you’ll probably struggle to find other community members who’ve previously asked questions on the issues you're facing, preventing you from easily finding solutions.

Taken together, you’ll end up with a community or forum that’s unhelpful, frustrating, and—put simply—not worth your time.

This is also assuming that the API provider offers a community or forum. In reality, the vast majority of providers simply can’t invest the time and effort necessary to build  and oversee them.

Customer support can be difficult to access and unhelpful

When you find an API provider’s documentation and communities or forums to be unhelpful, you’ll likely get little respite from their support team.

API providers often make it difficult, if not impossible, for you to contact support for specific integration issues. And even if you can, their response time can be so lengthy that your team might be better off finding a fix through brute-force.

Avoid dealing with API integration support by partnering with Merge

Merge offers a single API to let you add hundreds of integrations to your product, allowing you to not have to rely on API providers’ documentation, support, and communities/forums when you’re building integrations.

We also offer additional resources and features that allow you to avoid API providers beyond the initial build.

For example, our partner engineering team is constantly monitoring your integrations and addressing any issues quickly. And our suite of Integration Observability features help your team—more specifically, your customer success managers—identify, diagnose, and address integration issues independently and quickly.

You can learn more about Merge by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.